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Show Page 168 turned to the problem of social order - what ideal did the Mormons have to contribute? he asked with the first number of a five-part booklet entitled The Kingdom of God. Just as he had denounced all the divines of spiritual Babylon, Orson flays its political superstructure with equal vehemence: "Any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the kingdom of God...Their authority is all assumed - it originated in man...Their very foundations were laid in rebellion...a heterogeneous mass of discordant elements." 19 The shaking of earthly powers going on around him was, in Orson's view, the natural consequence of rejecting legitimate authority, vested only in the Almighty and his representatives. Again, the question of right order cannot be resolved until divine sovereignty is recognized. The perplexities of the age originate with the idolatry of the age - "They have introduced a 'God without BODY, PARTS, or PASSIONS!...Such a being could not speak, for he has no 'parts' to speak with." Orson presents this as sufficient reason for the apparent "abdication" of the universal king'in his government of the affairs of men. In its five chapters, the first of which was completed in October 1848, he describes a charter for the kingdom of God, and in the process reveals some of the theocratic assumptions which undergirded the social polity of the Mormons. The entire logic of Mormonism rests on the principle of revelation, as Orson makes clear here. The Father, a finite being, governs by virtue of superior wisdom, but cannot be everywhere present. "It is therefore impossible for (him) to attend in person to all the multiplied affairs of government among intelligent beings; therefore, God, in establishing a government among men has always called persons of their own number to officiate in his name." Orson thus measures a society in relation to its « . ^ , n m -In the government of God, whether or not it rejects the divine |